Bernard Shaw and the Crikey Play

Two plays to read. One dusty on the shelf; the other very new, just arrived in the mail. The old is Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell in Plays Pleasant, a collection of four early works. When it was first published in 1898 the close-to-farce comedy hadn’t been performed. Written, said Shaw, to suit popular taste and commercial West End managements, “it was easier to do this than to persuade those who had asked for it that they had indeed got it”. Though it would become one of his most popular and most performed plays, the planned first production had been cancelled when major problems appeared during rehearsals. In Michael Holroyd’s excellent Shaw biography a desperately not-coping leading man was amazed to find, after Shaw demonstrated how his part should be played, that he was acting in a comedy.

The newer play is Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan; not a comedy. Her short script, sixty-four paperback pages which would run for about eighty minutes in performance, was commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Company and first staged in the USA in December 2012 and has not yet been performed in Australia. Both plays deal, in differing ways, with family matters, society and sex; between them lies the twentieth century. Pushing the characters from You Never Can Tell and The Great God Pan onstage together at the same time could be a play in itself; we seem to have changed our minds about what it is that makes us human.

Shaw, both a critic and playwright, used a performance of The School for Scandal to moralise (his word) about the dating of theatre and the changes that come with the passing of time:

As the world goes on, manners, customs, and morals change their aspect with revolutionary completeness, whilst man remains almost the same. Honor and decency, coats and shirts, cleanliness and politeness, eating and drinking, may persist as names; but the actual habits which the names denote alter so much that no century would tolerate those of its forerunner or successor … Nevertheless, men do change, not only in what they do, but in what they are … Everything has its own rate of change. Fashions change more quickly than manners, manners more quickly than morals, morals more quickly than passions, and, in general, the conscious, reasonable, intellectual life more quickly than the instinctive, wilful, affectionate one.

Reading Shaw can be even better than seeing him performed: his play texts are novels with speeches. He is there, on every page of You Never Can Tell—nagging, nagging, nagging, insisting, insisting we see the play his way. Setting out the four acts with a novelist’s clarity, he demands we share his affection for his puppets. The playing directions are dictatorial. Enlightening as literature, if taken seriously they would make an actor’s job unendurable. Try this in front of a mirror: “Valentine’s face lights up with sudden joy, dread, and mischief as he realizes that he is alone with Gloria.” Over just two pages of text Shaw expects his actors to show that they are behaving “testily”, “surprised”, “reassuringly”, “confidentially”, “vexed”, “horrified”. Feminist Mrs Clandon must rise from her seat, “with all the placidity of her age suddenly breaking up into a curious hard excitement, dignified but dogged, ladylike but implacable: the manner of the Old Guard”. Neither are costumes and props spared: who in the audience would realise that a saffron brown women’s costume includes a subversive “blouse of sea-green silk which scatters its conventionality with one stroke”.

After a long absence in Madeira, Mrs Clandon has returned to England with her three children and minus her inconvenient husband. The entanglements on Shaw’s stage include an amorous five-shilling dentist; “The Woman Question” is propagandised with good humour; the lost father is rediscovered—the missing parent evoked in language famously echoing Wilde’s recent success The Importance of Being Earnest:

Well, in a seaside resort there’s one thing you must have before anybody can afford to be seen going about with you; and that’s a father, alive or dead. Am I to infer that you have omitted that indispensable part of your social equipment?

There is a philosophic and comic waiter (a Doolittle in the making) and a lawyer in false nose and goggles. Shaw’s humour easily leaps a century. Mrs Clandon carries about the same strong views on female advancement she held as a young woman. Anticipating opposition to her opinions, she is prepared to courageously “demand university degrees, the opening of the professions, and the parliamentary franchise for women as well as men”, she is unsettled when an old friend mocks her views as outdated mid-century attitudes. Her critic points out that those once progressive ideas are, in the 1890s, utterly conventional and she has revealed herself to be even further behind the times by having failed to recognise the importance of socialism. However, he tells her, there is one place her old ideas would still be considered radical:

Mrs Clandon: (scornfully unconvinced) The Church, perhaps?

M‘Comas: No: The theatre.

Shaw wrote that “It ought to be a very serious comedy, dancing gaily to a happy ending round the grim earnest of Mrs Clandon’s marriage & her XIXth century George-Eliotism.” His sex war is good-natured and amusing. A man gets bright lines which, at modern fashionable inner-city theatres, would probably engender gasps from lady audiences and sniffles of girl-supportive disapproval from their male companions.

Valentine, the five-shilling dentist, immediately falls in love with Mrs Clandon’s very pretty daughter Gloria. He is relieved to learn that she has been brought up with stern feminist ideals and attitudes by her mother; it makes her seduction far simpler: “I learnt to circumvent the Women’s Rights woman before I was twenty-three: it’s all been found out long ago. You see, my methods are thoroughly modern.” And: “It’s true that I didn’t respect your old pride: why should I? it was nothing but cowardice. I didn’t respect your intellect: I’ve a better one myself: it’s a masculine speciality.”

The theatre critic William Archer was perceptive on his friend’s writing:

He sees things not as they are, but as it suits him to think they are. His vision is warped by his craving for the unexpected, for the startling, for the paradoxical. He constructs a system, or various systems, and then he fits things into them.

That is still a workable recipe for playwriting, provided the ingredients are fresh. Yet despite the obvious Shawness of his characters, his drama shadows a real world with the five-shilling dentist, the successful (in Madeira) woman writer, a boat builder, a solicitor and QC, and a waiter. Over a century later the characters in Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan inhabit what seems a more artificial world. The strange beings who wander across her stage include an internet journalist, a massage therapist, a licensed nutritionist, several people who have vague occupations funded by the government, and a young woman who appears to be a professional anorexic.

The Great God Pan begins simply: “Two men in their early thirties having coffee. Jamie is a good-looking and fairly clean-cut Brooklynite, Frank is a multiple-pierced, somewhat effeminate, wounded soul. They make an unlikely duo.” Jamie has met up with his childhood neighbour Frank and we quickly get transported through their life stories. The purpose for their meeting is that gay Frank wishes to tell straight Jamie that he believes his father molested them both when they were very young. Jamie remembers nothing. A similar, and very different, memory incident happened in You Never Can Tell. When Gloria’s re-found father tries to remind his daughter of incidents in their shared past (not molestation) she is “unmoved” (Shaw again) by her father’s appeal and says, “If you describe things to me, no doubt I shall presently imagine that I remember them. But I really remember nothing.” It’s a more sensible response than Jamie’s 100 years later.

Jamie’s relations with his partner Paige, with whom he has lived for six years, and his parents, is not happy. Once a dancer, Paige is now a licensed nutritionist and we see her in a session with Joelle, a young anorexic. Paige herself had grown fat, at which point Jamie lost sexual interest in her. She is now weight-controlled and pregnant. Jamie talks to his parents (Left-liberal cliché characters) about the molestation and finds that they had sent him to stay with the supposed paedophile when they had had conjugal problems of their own. Jamie visits his old child-minder Polly in her nursing home. Paige has an abortion. Herzog’s onstage use of familiar stereo­types draws from an offstage society bound around Left-liberal stereotypes held together with new yet already worn-out platitudes which no one believes in. When Shaw indulged in stage stereo­types, like his comic waiter, he introduced them as familiar stage devices which he then used to enjoyably explode audience expectations. Politically and socially Shaw activated for change: Herzog deals with the result.

Reading Herzog’s play, I get something very wrong. I miscast Jamie. He ran through my head as an ordinary Clark Kent thirty-something until his reply to child-minder Polly, now in her eighties, when she asks why he hasn’t married Paige took me by surprise: “Well … lots of reasons … you know, discrimination against our gay friends, who can’t get married, and, uh, it being fundamentally a religious institution, neither of us being religious …” As a reader I’m not sure whether the play has wandered into comedy or if this bumbling hypocrisy is meant to be played seriously.

Before I read the play again I find a photo of the opening scene in the American production. The gay character has arms covered in tattoos, and looks fairly much as one would expect. Jamie is a visual revelation. He isn’t from the Daily Planet, he’s from Crikey. Brooklynite? He’s from Brunswick. He is a somewhat weak and ineffectual metropolitan male who I mistook for a human being: the cliché inner-city hipster clone—once seen, never forgotten. I’ve completely misunderstood the play. I was looking for what Shaw called “instinctive, wilful, affectionate” responses, and instead received hypocrisy, intellectual arrogance, and weak-chinned pomposity—the sort of things on everyday display in Crikey: Tartuffes (plural) with a blog.

In the last scene Jamie and Frank are again together as Paige is having her abortion. Jamie, completely oblivious to the fact that he is talking of the death of a baby, the unborn child which has come from a six-year relationship, is given a short whine by Herzog that is a near-perfect expression of “The Man Question” in our declining Western civilisation. The Crikey male is a sensitive, selfish lost creature: “I wanted to have it. I decided. But she felt that we weren’t ready. That it would put too much pressure on our relationship. She doesn’t feel sure enough, she said. Of me.”

The play is finishing without resolution; it could run on inconsequentially for another hour or two and still get nowhere. Frank talks of his father’s confession and writes down what had occurred for Jamie to read later. With his arm outstretched Frank offers the piece of paper, Jamie steps forward to take it, and the play ends.

This short play is a sketch of a scene played out in the corner of a huge painting. It describes serious matters and then leaves the audience to do as they please. That’s not enough. Left-wing theatre audiences need to have the results of their stupidity thrown back at them with uncompromising clarity. On Herzog’s stage there is everyday hypocrisy, evil and stupidity. It isn’t enough to represent these things passively. Audiences don’t think for themselves, they applaud. Anorexic Joelle seeks help from Paige, who kills her unborn child, which has been produced during her six-year relationship with Jamie, who wonders if he was molested as a child. And then? Nothing.

In her earlier plays, 4,000 Miles and After the Revolution, Amy Herzog critically examined aspects of American liberalism from the inside. Her short play Belleville was an enjoyable thriller. The Great God Pan is the least satisfactory. In Australia, playwright David Williamson moved slightly out of the Left cultural mould then timidly retreated. The Great God Pan is a play idling at a crossroad. For its author there is acceptance and unworthy praise on one side, and, if she returns to serious criticism of her own political milieu, harsh great works and a rough critical road on the other. In the meantime, I wonder if the MTC would be interested in a Crikey on Ice for their Christmas panto season?

In an affectionate obituary for Michael Boddy, who died in April, Bob Ellis recalled Michael as a full-volumed Bohun QC in a production of You Never Can Tell: “vast, scarlet-bearded and bellowing like Pavarotti, he seemed a Disney special effect or a lost twin, perhaps, of James Robertson Justice.”

R.I.P. Michael Boddy, 1934–2014: influential theatre maker, marvellous and sensible food writer, and kindly man.